The inalienable rights of the abstract individual were immediately fused with national sovereignty

Evidence

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable—even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them—whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are. Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which rights they lost when they lost these human rights. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Rights of Man were only ever enforced as national rights, not universal ones; National emancipation came to be seen as a precondition for human rights; The French Revolution fused human rights with national sovereignty (+12 more)

Related

• The Rights of Man were only ever enforced as national rights, not universal ones (similarity 0.89)
• Human rights vanish for people who lack their own sovereign government (similarity 0.89)
• Modern statelessness strips rights more radically than medieval outlawry ever did (similarity 0.86)
• Inalienable human rights prove unenforceable for anyone outside a sovereign state (similarity 0.85)
• The French Revolution fused human rights with national sovereignty (similarity 0.85)
• Human rights were from the start subordinated to national self-determination. (similarity 0.85)
• The French Revolution fused human rights with national sovereignty, making statelessness mean rightlessness. (similarity 0.84)
• Human rights are only protected in practice by one’s own sovereign state. (similarity 0.83)
• Complete rightlessness is created before the right to live is threatened (similarity 0.82)
• Human-rights advocacy aimed at individuals fails against mass statelessness and discredits itself. (similarity 0.81)
• The rights declarations replaced historical rights with rights deduced from human nature. (similarity 0.80)
• The legal order presupposes every person must belong to some deportable territory (similarity 0.80)
• Human rights became an exceptional right for the underprivileged. (similarity 0.79)
• Rights-based sovereignty and utility calculus both converge on limiting the individual (similarity 0.79)
• Human rights replaced religious and estate guarantees in secularized society. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Human rights vanish for people who lack their own sovereign government #expands (0.85)
• Inalienable human rights prove unenforceable for anyone outside a sovereign state #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 714
• Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals #qualifies (0.75)
• State sovereignty is constituted by the nation-state system, not prior to it #expands (0.72) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 172
• Inner transformation precedes and drives national sovereignty #complicates (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 618
• Popular sovereignty can itself become a collective tyranny indistinguishable from a single tyrant #expands (0.72)
• Inner psychological mutation, not independence, is what generates national sovereignty #contradicts (0.70)